"I can't thank you enough," he said, "for thinking of this. It is a fault in me that I did not do so myself. One is too apt to forget that we are all body and spirit also. Forgive me!"
They all fell to at the sandwiches and so forth which two of Sir Thomas Ducaine's servants brought into the room.
Only Joseph took nothing at all. He stood by himself, tall, beautiful, lost in a reverie that no one disturbed.
He was musing and dreaming still as the carriages took the party to the East End of London.
But when Bishopsgate was passed at last, he threw his thoughts from him with a great effort, and became once more the keen and eager leader of those people whom he had brought to see the ultimate horror of the Modern Babylon.
They sent the carriages away at a certain turning in the Whitechapel Road. Then they plunged into the dark.
And how dark that darkness is! Fiction can hardly tell—fiction must not tell, fearing to infringe upon the bitterness and the agony of the truth. For we who write of things as they are must always consider our audience. Ask General Booth, G. R. Sims, or Mr. Holmes, the police-court missionary, what is the measure of this darkness. Ask the modern martyrs of our day, of all sects and creeds, who labor in these hell-ridden places.
Ask, and you shall hear nothing but the tolling of a great bell, the deep and awful sound of immedicable misery, the iron pæan of the blackness of sin, the deep and ringing wail of the mighty bell—the iron bell—which tolls of hopelessness, and voices the cry of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the lost!
The slaves of the Modern Babylon! But with one difference. In the walled city of wickedness between the two great rivers, hope had not come. They could not know that our Lord was to be born of a pure Virgin to save them——
Thoughts akin to these were in the minds of all of them as they went in and out of the foul slums of the East.